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Kimi (film)

2022 film directed by Steven Soderbergh

Kimi (stylized as KIMI) is a 2022 American thriller film about a tech worker who works on improving the responses of Kimi, a smart speaker.

I'm here!
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written and produced by David Koepp.
She's not the only one listening  (taglines)

Angela Childs

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  • And, trust me, I know bad. I used to moderate for Facebook.

Darius Popescu

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Dialogue

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I never gave you guys a retinal scan.
 
Who makes fake life online, huh?
Sharon: Tell our viewers what the main difference is, in your mind, between Kimi and products like Siri, or Alexa.
Bradley Hasling: Well, Sharon, I will tell you the difference between Kimi and those other products you mention by name. People. It's our people and their level of excellence that sets us apart. The voice interpolation on Kimi is a perfect example. We don't have an algorithm trying to figure out what you said or what you meant. We have actual people analyzing Kimi requests, so we can continually update our understanding of how you communicate, who you are, what you want.
Sharon: So, you're listening to everything?
Bradley Hasling: No, not at all. We are flagging miscommunication so that Kimi can better understand you.
Terry: When were you at the waterfront?
Angela: What are you looking at?
Terry: Your Instagram. You ate at The Pink Door?
Angela: [closes closet] No.
Terry: You wrote here you did.
Angela: I just liked the picture.
Terry: Why did you write "Oh, my God, so delicious," if you've never been there before?
Darius: You know, you only ever call me when you need a favor. And your Instagram is bullshit, by the way. I data scraped. It's full of reposts and lies. I don't even know who you are, really. [takes a shot drink] Ah! Who makes fake life online, huh?
Angela: Literally everyone.
Angela: I never gave you guys a retinal scan.
Natalie: Sorry?
Angela: Downstairs. There was a retinal scanner at the door and it let me in, but I never sat for a scan.
Natalie: Well, we take them off the video conferences. It's faster.
Angela: But I didn't give permission.
Natalie: Sure you did. It's in the terms and conditions of the conference software.
Angela: Nobody reads those.
Antonio Rivas: That envelope looks thin.
Bradley Hasling: It's a Coinbase login.
Antonio Rivas: Better be enough.
Bradley Hasling: It's everything I have left.

About Kimi (film)

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  • The nexus of tech and crime in "Kimi" packs a personal and a collective outrage at the ways in which tech companies have abandoned their civic responsibility and allowed, even fostered, propaganda—whether anti-vax or conspiracy-theorist or racist or misogynistic or anti-Semitic or xenophobic—that has got people killed. The depraved indifference in the name of stock prices finds its symbol in Kimi—not only in the way it's managed but also in its seemingly innocent domestic presence. The blatant but forceful metaphorical condensation of world-spanning power in a conical gizmo energizes Soderbergh's direction throughout; it appears inseparable from the physicality and the visual intensity that distinguish the movie from more routine storytelling.
  • Soderbergh drops us into that world with a casualness that's unnerving precisely because of how unnerving it is't; this is how we live now, he and screenwriter David Koepp suggest, with a pandemic outside our windows and the world at our fingertips. Most of "Kimi" unfolds in the spacious Seattle loft that Angela calls home, though we soon see that it has also become her gym, her workspace and her permanent refuge.
    Like the heroine of last year’s misbegotten "The Woman in the Window" and many a shut-in protagonist before her, Angela (played by Zoë Kravitz) is agoraphobic, an anxiety disorder she says she’d gotten a handle on until COVID-19 lockdown set in. Now she's content never to leave her almost entirely Kimi-run apartment, outsourcing menial tasks to an inanimate hub that records her every data point and keeps her under 24-7 digital surveillance.
  • Only now, at a time of slow-motion crisis in the industry (will audiences come back to theaters?) and seriously over-inflated budgets, Soderbergh's latest little movie, the nimble and sinister cyber-age corporate thriller "Kimi," plays as an object lesson in showing us a way forward. It's a welcome reminder that less, in the movies, can sometimes be more. It's also an art-suspense pastiche that's clever enough to hook you. More than half the film is set in a spacious, second-floor renovated industrial loft condo in Seattle, where Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), a waifish millennial in a wavy bob of blue hair, stares out her window, taking in the late-morning sun as she checks out the neighbors in the apartment building across the street (a couple of them look back).
  • In a sleek 89 minutes, writer David Koepp (whose similarly contained thriller Panic Room was notably watched by Soderbergh twice last year) keeps things refreshingly simple and stringently devoid of any extraneous padding. It's no surprise, after an opening tease concerning the financial specifics of the company behind Kimi, that there's a conspiracy to unravel but it unravels with a quick ease, an age-old tale of the hero who saw too much and the villain who wants to keep them quiet. We know where films like this tend to go, and Kimi is light on genuine surprise, but Koepp and Soderbergh keep most of it grounded, avoiding the clumsy narrative leaps these films often resort to, making so much of it feel awfully credible.
  • Crucially, Kravitz's performance isn't overly concerned with coming across as likeable. She's short with people. A little cold, sometimes. "Covid was a little bit of a setback," she admits, shrugging off her trauma as if it were just another daily toil. Without the exhausting mantle of self-prescribed importance, Kimi has successfully captured how the pandemic, for many, has felt like watching an invisible hand slowly chip away at their lives. Sitting all day on Zoom and yet feeling lonelier than ever is an exhausting experience.
  • At a time when Facebook guru Mark Zuckerberg's ambivalence about privacy issues and his ambitious Metaverse plans have cast him in a dubious light, it feels appropriate to make a villain out of a tech conglomerate CEO eyeing a squillion-dollar personal profit from an IPO. And it's a sly inside joke to cast neo-illusionist Derek DelGaudio in the role of Amygdala Corporation chief Bradley Hasling, taking his company public on the strength of a virtual assistant called Kimi.
  • Ruthless and precise, Steven Soderbergh's "KIMI" is a timely commentary on isolation and intrusion. Anchored by a striking performance from Zoë Kravitz, it sees the expert craftsman working with genre again, like how he did in "Side Effects" and "Unsane," taking a classic concept right out of "Rear Window" or "Blow Out" and making it current to the era of Covid-19 and Alexa.
    • Brian Tallerico, KIMI, RogerEbert.com, February 10, 2022
  • Kimi's obvious inspirations include Rear Window (when it comes to the homebound Angela’s relationship to the wall of windows outside) and Blow Out (in its treatment of the audio evidence and the conspiratorial forces she stumbles onto). Its Hitchcockian aspirations are further signaled by the lush score from Cliff Martinez, which is deliberately out of step with the sleek, tech-centric setting.

Taglines

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  • She's not the only one listening

Cast

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